Papi Steak

Control brought to a louder pass

The steakhouse gesture is set against a louder room at Papi Steak in Miami Beach, where the pass has to hold its line while the evening gathers volume. The restaurant came out of a partnership between David Einhorn, whose nickname gives the house its name, and David Grutman of Groot Hospitality. Einhorn's grilling started at home, in a kosher Brooklyn household and then at private dinners, before his steak with its secret sauce reached the menu at Komodo and became its top seller.

That history matters in South of Fifth because Papi Steak is built around scale, theatre and meat rather than quietness. The founding register is Golden Era Hollywood swagger crossed with modern Miami energy. The kitchen's job is not to erase the room's appetite for spectacle; it is to keep the cooking legible inside it, with hand-selected aged beef grilled to order and finished the same way every time.

Tomahawks, sauce, and the case

The menu gives the kitchen blunt instruments and asks for precision. The 32-ounce Tomahawk Papi Steak carries the house name, cut in the steakhouse register and finished with Papi Steak Sauce. The larger gesture is the 55-ounce Australian Wagyu Tomahawk in Briefcase, a tableside presentation that arrives as theatre before it returns to the plate as beef. That sequence can overwhelm a weaker kitchen. Here, the method has to keep the fat, char and temperature in command while the room attends to the case.

Around the beef, the program leans into kosher-style cuts and the Jewish inflections that shaped the original idea: Wagyu pastrami, latkes with applesauce, a chicken schnitzel built at scale, and steakhouse sides that know they are part of the order rather than an afterthought. Truffle Corn, Mac and Cheese, and Creamed Spinach sit close to the main event, rich enough to hold their ground beside grilled meat. The beverage program follows the same high-energy pattern, with craft cocktails and a curated wine list set up for prime beef, seafood and long tables.

The room keeps raising the volume

The room does not behave like a hushed chophouse. Red velvet seating, exotic floral print walls, smoky reflection and dramatic light give the service a nightclub charge, and the music rises as the night moves on. At the pass, that means the kitchen works against momentum: plates leave into a room already in motion, where a steak may arrive with cameras out and a table leaning forward.

Papi Steak opened on 12 September 2019 at 736 1st Street, and later returned from renovation with a reimagined 100-seat room. The scale stays intimate, but the energy is built to feel larger than the footprint. The task is to keep the hand present inside that amplification, from the sear on the Tomahawk to the weight of the Wagyu pastrami.